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MOMENTUM AiR
Henri Cash-Finlay
1 March – 30 June 2025
ARTIST BIO
After graduating from the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, with a bachelor’s degree in fine art (visual art) in 2017, Henri has spent the last half-decade working in remote Indigenous Art Centres across Australia. Primarily as a curator, Henri has produced exhibitions for most major Australian cities as well as internationally.
In 2024 Henri went on a sabbatical in Berlin, advocating for Indigenous artists and to solidify his own art practice.
Henri continues to be an avid supporter of the arts through his initiative AREA, established to provide space for artists to explore new methods of work not possible without additional resourcing. AREA is currently focused on supplementing Indigenous Australian Art Centres with curatorial, administrative and material support.
Ali Curung, silver gelatine print, 16.5 x 25 cm, 2023
Gustav at the Beach, silver gelatine print, 16.5×25 cm, circa 2022
Dad at the Wedding (detail), silver gelatine print, 15×10 cm, 2022
ARTIST STATEMENT
For this residency, I am interested in exploring the material conditions and cultural separations of the Australian nation-state and its structure as a “double nation”, so explored in historian Ian McLean’s book of the same name. In seeking to quantify the generative intersection of environment and genealogy and its subsequent sprouting of culture and personhood I have turned to documentary-style portraiture of my own family. There is an allocation of place or placement in the act of photography that I rely on to explore these ideas surrounding nationality in the context of this double nation.
The residency project will experiment with the process of photodegradation as a novel method of art making.
The material change of objects under intense sun exposure implicit in the process of photodegradation mimics the burning of European colonists in the severe Australian landscape. This rejection by the environment has become synonymous with contemporary Australian identity as exemplified in the 1904 poem My Country by Dorothea Mackellar detailing a “love for a sunburnt country”, a poem that has since instilled itself as part of Australia’s national consciousness.
It is in the combination of this novel process and through photographic placement that I continue my work exploring the duality of this double nation Australia.
– Henri Cash-Finlay
Yoghurt’s Arms, 35mm film scan, dimensions variable, 2024
Jazz, 35mm film scan, dimensions variable, 2019
Jazz Playing My Toy Accordion, 35mm film scan, dimensions variable, 2019
Dad and O’ in the Todd River, silver gelatine print, 25 x 18.75 cm, 2022
Eline at the Wedding, 35mm film scan, dimensions variable, 2022
Frey at the Reptile Park, silver gelatine print, 15 x 10 cm, 2023
Frey in the Todd River, 35mm film scan, dimensions variable, 2022